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Some good Hip-Hop news at the top of 2023. De La Soul’s catalog of classic music, most of which has been missing from streaming services for years, will finally be available in March.
The group—Dave (fka Trugoy The Dove), Posdnous and Mase—announced on Tuesday (Jan. 3), that their music would be on streamers starting March 2. The date happens to coincide with the anniversary the Long Island Hip-Hop group’s landmark debut album 3 Feet High and Rising.
“The Reservoir and Chrysalis teams have worked with De La Soul, and their record label, AOI, to bring their music to digital streaming services,” said De La in a statement, as reported by Variety. “Reservoir is pleased to share that De La Soul’s first six albums, ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ (1989), ‘De La Soul Is Dead’ (1991), ‘Buhloone Mindstate’ (1993), ‘Stakes Is High’ (1996), ‘Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump’ (2000), and ‘AOI: Bionix’ (2001), will be available to fans everywhere March 3rd, 2023, on the 34th anniversary of the release of their debut album, ‘3 Feet High and Rising.’”
De La Soul’s catalog was largely absent from streaming services due to sample clearance issues. However, in 2021, their catalog on Tommy Boy Records was acquired by Reservoir Media, which has been at work to finally make De La’s music available on services like Spotify and Amazon Music. But that took longer than expected with initial reports saying the music would land back in November 2021.
Read more about De La Soul’s triumphant return to streaming at Variety.
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It has been 10 years since Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views. In addition to pushing K-pop into the global stratosphere, the vibrant video (now with more than 4.6 billion views, as of Dec. 2022) kickstarted the video-streaming platform’s official Billion Views Club — which has grown to become a landmark achievement for artists and industry leaders alike.
Over 300 music videos have entered the club since its inception in 2012 and several have surpassed Psy’s history-making visual. Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” reigns as the most-viewed music video on YouTube, crossing 8 billion views just five years after its release. Also lapping Psy are Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” with 5.8 billion views, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” featuring Charlie Puth with 5.7 billion views, and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” featuring Bruno Mars with 4.7 billion views, all as of Dec. 2022.
A number of superstar musical acts have had multiple videos surpass a billion views — including Justin Bieber, Adele, Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift. Colombian singer-songwriter J Balvin has entered the Billion Views Club 12 different times, making him the artist with the most videos in the coveted club.
In 2022 alone, more than 50 music videos earned their first billion views. While some musical acts made their triumphant return to the Billion Views Club, others earned their first entries ever. The Weeknd added his fifth video with a billion views thanks to “Save Your Tears,” less than two years after its premiere. On the other hand, Cyndi Lauper reached the milestone for the first time with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” 39 years after its initial release (though it wasn’t uploaded to YouTube until 2009).
To celebrate a decade of billions, Billboard revisits all 51 music videos to enter YouTube’s Billion Views Club in 2022 below.
TOKYO — For non-Japanese music artists, Japan’s decades-long obsession with physical media has meant they must grapple with legacy strategies for getting attention in the world’s second-largest market — such as landing on a major Japanese TV show or getting CDs into a large brick-and-mortar retailer.
Now, new digital opportunities are emerging that could make it easier. A three-year-old YouTube channel, The First Take, is at the forefront of breaking new artists in Japan and nudging a market long allergic to the internet toward digital music consumption. The channel has featured a handful of big Western artists in 2022, including Harry Styles, who appeared in June to sing “Daughters” from this year’s Harry’s House, and Avril Lavigne, who in September offered up a stripped-down version of “Complicated.”
Launched in late 2019, The First Take now boasts more than 7 million subscribers. It landed its first viral videos with five episodes featuring singer-songwriter LiSA, who performed the opening theme to the anime series Demon Slayer. But it was in the early months of the pandemic when the channel — like other digital entertainment in Japan — surged in popularity.
Digital music sales, which have grown for eight straight years in Japan, jumped 13% to 89.54 billion yen ($660.3 million) in 2021 over 2020, while physical music consumption, which has fallen over the past three years, dipped slightly by 0.4% to 193.64 billion yen ($1.43 billion), according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan. (Physical sales still comprised 68.4% of total sales, easily the highest level of any major music market.)
Fresh-faced artists stepping up to the mic on The First Take to show off their skills — such as Yoasobi, Yuuri and DISH//— have gone on to top the Billboard Japan Hot 100 and produced videos with over 100 million views. They’ve done so primarily through digital and streaming channels, reflecting a shift in how listeners receive J-pop domestically.
When the team started work on the channel in 2019, “what we wanted to create was something you couldn’t see on TV, or more detailed than what you would see on a weekly music show,” says channel producer Makoto Uchida. They drew inspiration from NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series and Germany’s Colors. “We decided to shoot it from the side, rather than the front, so that it felt like you were in the studio, getting a peek of the artist at work.”
They leaned into this sense of intimacy by positioning The First Take as, well, a first take, capturing whatever the artist sings into the microphone, with errors and emotion on full display. Channel director Naoko Furukawa says that early on, driving this point across to participating artists proved most challenging, as many came in assuming they would have the chance to redo performances.
Soshi Sakayama from The First Take
Kazuki Nagayama
The First Take saw a substantial increase in views, with uploads featuring young creators like DISH// and Yoasobi, who went from fledgling J-pop names to chart toppers, particularly on subscription services such as Spotify.
The First Take is among the first major music efforts in Japan to use streaming data to target the show’s main demographic of 20- and 30-year-olds, and to determine when artists should perform, says team member Kazuto Fushimi.
“The data shows that Japanese people listen to music by seasons,” Fushimi says. “I used that to cast songs that would fit well for this project at certain times of the year.”
Even after Japan loosened COVID-19 restrictions later in 2020, The First Take morphed into an internet-era version of weekly TV shows like Music Station, a music program featuring live performances that started airing in Japan in 1986. It has added a news platform, podcast and live concerts, and has also tried to bring in artists from other markets, initially from China and other Southeast Asian countries.
“We used anime and anime songs to get attention from those markets,” says Fushimi. “They weren’t made explicitly for foreign audiences, but we always made sure to put subtitles and other things so that everyone could follow along too.”
K-pop group Stray Kids was the first non-Japanese artist to appear on The First Take, in the spring of 2020. Fushimi says many new viewers came to the clip via Twitter, where fan communities were sharing it and explaining what The First Take was. The Korean act has appeared on the channel two more times since, which has further boosted their video views on YouTube. “The more that they’ve appeared, the more likely they are to appear on the ‘related’ videos list, which leads to more fan engagement,” Fushimi says.
Other K-pop acts have appeared on the channel since — most recently, burgeoning girl group Kep1er — as have acts from other parts of the continent, including a recent turn by Taiwanese artist WeiBird.
The team’s focus didn’t move beyond the region until this past summer when they landed Styles in June and started looking outside Asia to the West. The team put together English-language promotional materials for Twitter, knowing that it would get them new looks from abroad. Fushimi says Styles’ appearance generated the most tweets about any artist on The First Take to date. (The First Take’s producers declined to share how the Styles collaboration specifically came together.)
“Compared with Japanese artists, foreign artists really are quick about recording – they don’t take much time for rehearsals, they just jump right in,” Furukawa says. “Harry Styles only took 10 minutes after he showed up to the studio to do the actual recording.”
Lavigne’s video followed several months later, attracting over 7 million viewers (boosted by a domestic love for her music that has endured for decades), and offering The First Take another opportunity to tip-toe toward Western attention.
“It’s hard to export J-pop to the world,” Fushimi says, “but we want to use The First Take as a bridge to introduce great Japanese artists to the world.”
ReoNa from The First Take
Kazuki Nagayama
The Cramps‘ 1981 recording of “Goo Goo Muck” became an out-of-left field success story in November after its use in a dance scene in the hit Netflix series Wednesday helped a new generation discover the song, first released in 1962 by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads.
Music trends, created by viral hits on TikTok and YouTube, are unpredictable, though. As soon as “Goo Goo Muck” was enjoying its newfound fame, along came “Bloody Mary,” a deep cut from Lady Gaga‘s 2011 album Born This Way. Fans inspired by the Wednesday scene uploaded videos of themselves performing the dance to TikTok and other platforms, but many swapped out the audio of “Goo Goo Muck” with a sped-up version of “Bloody Mary” — including Gaga herself after the singer caught onto the trend.
Lady Gaga may have stolen some of The Cramps’ thunder. As weekly growth of on-demand streams of “Goo Goo Muck” slowed — from 177% to 7% in the last two weeks — on-demand streams of “Bloody Mary” increased 88% to 43.1 million in the week of Dec. 9. About 89% of the streams came from video platforms, namely YouTube, where the sped-up version of the recording is used in videos of people recreating the Wednesday dance scene.
Still, “Goo Goo Muck” is having a fairy tale of a fourth quarter. Between Nov. 18 to Dec. 16, its weekly U.S. on-demand streams increased about 200 times, from 31,000 to 6.1 million. Download sales were strong enough to put “Goo Goo Muck” at No. 25 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart for the week of Dec. 10. “It’s a really amazing, fun little bonanza,” Jim Shaw, owner of the song’s publishing rights, previously told Billboard.
Both tracks also got a boost from being featured on some major playlists. On Nov. 30, Spotify added “Goo Goo Muck” to its Big on the Internet playlist, which has nearly 3 million followers, and on Dec. 6 it added the track to its Teen Beats playlist, which boasts over 1.8 million followers, according to Chartmetric. “Bloody Mary” is also featured on both playlists and is currently the leadoff track on Teen Beats.
Exactly one decade ago, on Dec. 21, 2012, Psy‘s “Gangnam Style” made history as the first music video to reach 1 billion YouTube views. As a result, YouTube’s Billion Views Club was born. A way to celebrate official videos that have achieved peak virality, the club is now home to over 300 music videos, including many of the most iconic hits from the past 10 years — from Adele‘s “Hello” to Luis Fonsi‘s “Despacito” feat. Daddy Yankee.
But how much do artists get paid for crossing the billion-view threshold for a music video on YouTube? The royalties are dependent on a few factors. Label affiliation, location and type of view affect these rates significantly. For example, artists signed to major labels — which represent the vast majority of members of the Billion Views Club — earn higher rates on the platform than those who are unsigned or affiliated with an indie label.
But location is possibly the biggest determining factor of all: in the U.S., rates are generally higher than in other countries. So while an official YouTube music video for a major-label artist could generate a blended average of $0.0038 per stream in the U.S., globally — which is how YouTube counts its views — Billboard estimates that rate at $0.0026 per stream. YouTube Premium video streams (views from customers who subscribe to YouTube’s ad-free video-watching tier) are also higher than plays from users on the ad-supported tier, both in the U.S. and globally.
Consequently, for major-label artists, 1 billion video streams on an official music video would generate about $2.6 million globally. That’s, of course, before the label takes their cut of royalties, which varies widely based on each artist’s individual deal, and before the artist takes into account what, if anything, they owe to their featured artists or producers on the track.
For non-official videos that use music — like a user-generated video of someone’s visit to the zoo, set to a song by a major-label artist — that global blended stream estimate would drop down to $0.0021, given lower payouts on UGC videos and the over-indexing of UGC viewership vs. that of official videos. So for a major-label song on YouTube that generates 1 billion views across all videos that use it, the label and artist would generate closer to $2.1 million.
Of the more than 300 music videos on YouTube to hit 1 billion views, the fastest to reach the benchmark is “Hello” by Adele, which took just 88 days from release to amass such a viewership. Next is a tie between “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran and “Despacito,” both of which took 97 days. The third and fourth places on the list are also both held by Spanish-language songs, with “Mi Gente” by J Balvin and Willy William earning the title in 103 days and “Échame La Culpa” by Luis Fonsi and Demi Lovato taking 111 days.
Additional Reporting by Ed Christman.
Preview
This time every year, enduring favorites by Mariah Carey, Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms rise to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 as Americans turn to holiday streaming playlists and Christmas-focused radio stations. However, these evergreens, celebrating the biggest Christian holiday of the year, are more secular than in years past.
It used to be that contemporary takes on traditional songs about the birth of Christ — “Little Drummer Boy,” “Joy to the World,” “Silent Night” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” — were among the most popular holiday songs. Listeners enjoyed Nat King Cole’s “O Come All Ye Faithful” as much as his version of “Deck the Halls.” Kenny Rogers had a popular take on “Mary, Did You Know?,” first recorded in 1991 by Michael English of the Christian group the Gaither Vocal Band. Martina McBride’s rendition of “O Holy Night,” a Christmas carol from the 1840s, was among the top 100 holiday songs.
In 2022, as streaming playlists drive listening, the top 100 holiday songs are more likely to conjure images of Santa, sleigh bells and cold weather than a baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Through Dec. 8, religious music had only a 4.4% share of the top 100 holiday songs’ total consumption — tied with 2021 for the lowest since 2010, according to a Billboard analysis of Luminate data. The top religious song since the first week of November, “O Come All Ye Faithful” by Nat King Cole, ranks only No. 50, the lowest for a No. 1. religious song since 2010. “Mary, Did You Know?” by Pentatonix ranks a mere No. 68 and Rogers’ version of the song has fallen to No. 255.
In terms of market share, religious holiday songs peaked in 2015 with 18.2% of the top 100 holiday tracks’ total consumption, which measures digital downloads and streaming. Vocal group Pentatonix owned six of the 13 religious songs in the top 100 holiday tracks, including No. 3 (“Mary, Did You Know?”), No. 25 (“Little Drummer Boy”) and No. 30 (“White Winter Hymnal”). The combined consumption of two versions of “Mary, Did You Know?” by Jordan Smith (No. 2) and Pentatonix (No. 3) that year was 17% greater than that of the No. 1 recording, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Religious songs captured the most number of spots in the top 100 in 2013, with 14 of the top holiday songs for the final two months of the year being religious in nature. There were two versions of “The Little Drummer Boy,” by Pentatonix (No. 3) and Harry Simeone Chorale (No. 74). Recordings of “Silent Night” by Kelly Clarkson (No. 21) and The Temptations (No. 44) were popular at the time. There were four versions of “O Holy Night” in the top 100: Celine Dion (No. 48), Mariah Carey (No. 77), Martina McBride (No. 96) and Pentatonix (No. 97). And Amy Grant’s original song “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song)” ranked No. 82.
To categorize holiday music as secular or religious, Billboard considered each track’s lyrical content. Religious songs contain references to Biblical characters (e.g., Jesus, God or the Virgin Mary) or Christian themes (the nativity scene). Billboard counted Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukuh Song” as religious for its references to Judaism. A song like “Hallelujah,” written by Leonard Cohen and covered countless times by the likes of Pentatonix and Carrie Underwood, has a religious-sounding title but is classified as secular.
How holiday music is consumed — like all music — has changed over the years. From 2015, when religious holiday music reached its peak market share, to 2022, downloads’ contribution to total consumption of the top 100 holiday songs dropped from 49% to just 1.4%. This year, numerous religious songs, including For King & Country’s “Little Drummer Boy” and Lauren Daigle’s “Light of the World,” have relatively strong download sales but too few streams to make the top 100.
Radio stations favor a different slate of religious holiday songs than streaming platforms, such as versions of the 1962 song “Do You Hear What I Hear?” by Martina McBride, Carrie Underwood and Whitney Houston that fall outside of the top 100 holiday streaming recordings. Traditional songs like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” recorded by the likes of Barenaked Ladies and Mannheim Steamroller, consistently perform well at U.S. radio. “Songs like ‘O Holy Night,’ ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ and ‘The First Noel’ still test equally well for us,” says Tom Poleman, chief programming officer for iHeartMedia, in an email to Billboard.
But the data show U.S. radio airplay of holiday music has also become more secular in recent years. In November and December of 2015, there were 16 religious songs in the top 100 holiday recordings as measured by spins. The top religious recording, “The Little Drummer Boy” by Harry Simeone Chorale, ranked No. 25 and was closely followed by two versions of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” by Houston and Bing Crosby at No. 33 and No. 34, respectively. Rogers’ and Pentatonix’s covers of “Mary, Did You Know?” also ranked in the top 100.
This year, through Dec. 8, there were only 6 religious songs in the top 100, and the top track, “The Little Drummer Boy” by Harry Simeone Chorale, had fallen to No. 72. Christian artist Amy Grant still makes the top 100, but her versions of “Winter Wonderland,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Sleigh Ride” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” have performed better than her top religious song, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
The final rankings could have more religious songs come Christmas, however. Radio stations tend to play religious-themed songs more often as Christmas nears, says Sean Ross, author of the Ross on Radio newsletter. That would mean tracks such as “The First Noel” by Andy Williams and “Joy to the World” by Nat King Cole, both top 100 tracks in 2021, could get more plays and rise through the ranks in the coming week.
Spotify has promoted longtime employee John Stein to head of North America, editorial, the company announced on Tuesday (Dec. 20). He reports directly to Sulinna Ong, global head of editorial at the streaming service.
Stein joined Spotify in 2013 after the streamer acquired his previous company, the playlisting firm Tunigo. Prior to his promotion, he worked as lead of music culture and editorial, overseeing strategy and curation for Spotify’s U.S. editorial playlists and becoming a strong voice on the company’s editorial team and the music team as a whole.
In 2018, Stein co-created Spotify’s successful genre-less playlist Pollen, which today boasts more than 1.3 million likes on the platform. Due to Pollen’s phenomenal success, the streaming service began leaning into the concept of playlist-as-brand and eventually introduced other similar playlists, including the pop-leaning Lorem (more than 969,000 likes) and the Nordic region-focused Oyster (more than 102,000 likes).
With his promotion, Stein has three new direct reports on his team. They include Rachel Whitney, head of Nashville, editorial; Antonio Vasquez, head of U.S. Latin, editorial; and Ronny Ho, head of dance and electronic development, editorial. The trio joins Stein’s existing team, which includes Ehis Osifo, editor, editorial partnerships; Jess Huddleston, editorial lead, Canada with her direct reports Marc Matar, junior editor, Canada and Karla Moy, editor, Canada; Talia Kraines, senior editor, United States with her direct reports Fredrik Fencke, editor and Lulu Largent, junior editor; and Elizabeth Szabo, senior editor, along with her direct report William Nellis, junior editor, North America.
Wednesday is officially a smash. The Netflix show, which premiered Nov. 23, has climbed the ranks since its release and has become the third most watched show on the streaming platform after Stranger Things and Squid Game, but for the show’s composer Danny Elfman, the success came as a major surprise.
Speaking alongside Phoebe Bridgers for an interview with NME published Friday (Dec. 16), the composer — well known and loved for his work on The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Alice in Wonderland and more — spoke about what it was like working on Wednesday and how he feels about the show resonating with the masses.
“Wednesday was just fun. I grew up on The Addams Family, but I really also dug the Charles Addams cartoons even more so, so for me, it was like a well known kind of character, so to do a variation [of Wednesday] it was just fun,” Elfman said.
When the interviewer asked if the show’s success came as a surprise to him, the composer replied, “Yeah, completely. But you gotta realize, I’m surprised by anything I do having any success. When Batman came out, I was composing to a cut that was so dark on the video I could barely even tell what was happening at the time. I thought this was going to be a little cult film at best, and so the fact that it was a big hit — that shocked me and surprised me. I thought Wednesday would be like Batman: I thought it was going to be a little cult thing.”
Wednesday has been quite the opposite of “a little cult thing” — the show’s synch of The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” drove up on-demand streams of the track to more than 2 million in the U.S. in the week of Nov. 25 to Dec. 1, a more than 8,650% increase from the average 47 weeks before this year. And though Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” was not featured in the show, it also gained 2 million streams thanks to the show’s corresponding TikTok dance trend.
Watch Elfman talk about Wednesday in the video above.
Over the past three years, the music business has become less dependent on the biggest hits, which account for a smaller share of total streams than they once did. Not in December, though. Holiday music is dominated by a relatively small number of big recordings — Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” — and that hasn’t changed since 2019.
So far this season, through Dec. 8, the top 50 holiday songs accounted for 34.3% of all streams from the top 10,000 holiday tracks — the exact same percentage as when Billboard looked at holiday music in Dec. 2019. The share of the top 100, at 46.1%, is just slightly lower than the 46.6% share from 2019 while the shares of the top 250, 500 and 1,000 are all less than one percentage point lower than three years ago.
That’s not surprising. Holiday listening is dominated by a small number of recordings that have become enduring favorites. Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” has reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 every year since 2019. The order of the next few songs hasn’t changed either: Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” Burl Ives’ “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas,” and Andy Williams’ “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Other than “All I Want for Christmas,” all of them were recorded before 1964.
New holiday tracks have a hard time breaking through. At 28 years old, Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” is an outlier among tracks that are usually 50 years or older. “Last Christmas” by Wham!, currently fifth in on-demand audio streams, is a relatively youthful 36. At Nos. 8 and 12, Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” are the babies of the top 10.
Pop music has no use for such tradition, or centrality – especially now that personalization has reduced the number of plays track get from prominent placement on streaming-service playlists. From 2019 to 2022, the share of the top 10,000 on-demand streaming songs devoted to the top 50 went from 10.3% to 5.8%. The share of the top 250 went from 25.5% to 17.5% during that same period, while the share of the top 1000 went from 49.2% to 41.6%.
Christmas is one of the few times – perhaps because most people spend it with friends or family – when we all listen to the same songs.
Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, about the role streaming playlists play in this growing sector, originally ran last year
If you search “Christmas 2021” on Spotify, the top result will be a massive playlist—124 tracks and six hours long—that opens with Queen’s “Thank God It’s Christmas,” then dips into a range of old and new holiday songs from Bing Crosby, Katy Perry, Ella Fitzgerald, Kacey Musgraves and others before landing on “I Want You Home (#heimnachten),” a track from last year by European relative unknowns Bowie & Pyrah. It’s not user-generated. Rather, it’s carefully curated by Universal Music Group, using “data, insight, analytics,” according to Mike Biggane, UMG’s executive vp music strategy and tactics.
“Our hope is somebody’s going to discover our playlists by the holidays, put it on and just let it go,” he says. “They won’t have the urge to change.”
The holiday-music streaming season, which unofficially begins the day after Halloween, is big business for labels. Last year, Universal’s more than 500 holiday playlists, created by 200 curators in 67 countries, generated over 120 million streams from Nov. 1 to Dec. 21, according to Biggane. In the CD era, some 20 years ago, labels’ fourth-quarter strategies centered on turning superstar releases into stocking stuffers. Now that streaming accounts for 83% of industry revenue, as of 2020, however, holiday-music clicks are a bigger focus of fourth-quarter plans. Holiday music generated $177 million for the U.S. music industry in 2018, Billboard estimates.
Vinnie Freda, a former Warner and Universal digital music executive, isn’t surprised by UMG’s six-hour playlist since holiday music is often a lean back and listen experience. “People put that stuff on repeat,” he says, adding that it’s a win when listener can essentially set it and forget it, that’s a win. “Generally, Christmas music is fungible: ‘If I can get you to listen to this thing for the next six hours, that means you’re not listening to Sony Music.’”
Because the holiday-music streaming numbers are so massive, labels now have year-round project teams and staff to promote catalog evergreens, from the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas to Bing Crosby’s Christmas Classics to Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift to You. They also encourage contemporary stars to record new holiday albums, like Dolly Parton’s A Holly Dolly Christmas last year or Kelly Clarkson’s recent When Christmas Comes Around, whose “Christmas Isn’t Canceled (Just You)” went viral and generated 1.5 million Spotify plays and 1.2 million YouTube views by early December.
Ariana Grande performs “Last Christmas” and “Santa Tell Me” during the taping of the Disney Parks “Frozen Christmas Celebration” TV Special in the Magic Kingdom Park at the Walt Disney World Resort on Dec. 9, 2014 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
Mark Ashman/Disney Parks via GI
Even if a recent recording gets lost amid the annual avalanche of holiday content, its use in a Christmas movie or TV special could promote streaming for years to come. Amazon Music has noticed recent streaming spikes for Faith Hill’s “Where Are You Christmas,” from the 2000 soundtrack to the Jim Carrey movie Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, as well as Ariana Grande’s 2014 single “Santa Tell Me.” “Holiday music can grow,” says Karen Pettyjohn, Amazon Music’s senior music curator. While new releases are expected to deliver instant hits, “that same expectation doesn’t apply here, because it’s about nostalgia and memory.”
In the few days before Christmas 2020, Alexa requests for festive songs on playlists like Merry Mix totaled more than 15 million per day. “People use it to soundtrack things, like a party or gingerbread-house making,” says Pettyjohn. “It’s long listening and it’s lean-back listening.” Adds Universal’s Biggane: “Voice is a major driver of streams for us, and our artists understand what a huge opportunity holiday music is for them.”
Craft Recordings, the catalog label owned by Concord Recorded Music, doesn’t have to do much to market its biggest holiday release, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s classic A Charlie Brown Christmas. According to Concord’s vp streaming Andrew Woloz, however, label reps try to ensure Guaraldi (and Craft’s other holiday songs), wind up on important streaming playlists. Sometimes that’s as simple as a label-generated playlist, like Jazz Christmas. It can also be a matter of finding the right playlist title to activate in response to a keyword in a common Alexa request. “People tend to search what they want to hear thematically. They drink hot chocolate, they sit by the fire, they’re wearing sweaters,” says Woloz. “You hone in on those words and build in those schematics.
“Holiday is such an evergreen genre, so catalog will take up so much of the real estate,” he adds. “New songs, even if they don’t hit an algorithm this year, maybe they’ll hit a wave in years to come. Artists have to keep feeding the content machine.”
Labels tend the content machine as well. Concord’s Craft, for example, pitches holiday music to music-streaming products like workout giant Peloton, which has a roster of holiday-themed classes and a new Holiday Collection playlist; Sony studies voice-activated streaming requests, looking at how to combine music with popular Alexa games or place strategic Amazon Music advertisements. And every label focuses on pitching holiday songs to top playlists, from Spotify’s Christmas Classics, which has 2.3 million likes, or Amazon Music’s Merry Mix, which hit the streaming service’s list of the top 10 playlists after launching in November.
Sony Music’s holiday-music project team is 10-15 employees, drawn from the company’s content, A&R, marketing and international departments. Unlike the project teams that focus on Valentine’s Day and Halloween, the holiday-music team works year-round, with one exception. “They have January off,” says Lyn Koppe, executive vp global catalog for the label’s catalog division, Legacy Recordings. “It’s not like on Halloween, suddenly we say, ‘We better start thinking about Christmas!’ We think about Christmas all year. We gather data and learn from it and experiment.”
Read more about the Booming Business of Christmas Music here.